A Living Catalog of Novae in M31

Scope of the Catalog: A comprehensive table of M31 novae going back to the first recorded nova in 1909 was created by W. Pietsch in the early years of this century and posted on the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) webpage (MPE Catalog). The catalog was closed to further updates at the end of April 2022. The purpose of the following table is to continue the M31 nova catalog, but in an abbreviated form. Known recurrent novae are noted, and shown in red; two likely but unconfirmed recurrent novae, M31N 1953-09b and 1961-11a, are also shown in red, with their Notes saying so. More information on the recurrent novae can be found in the companion M31 RN Table.

At present, we give the nova name, the JD of the start of the eruption, the equatorial coordinates (J2000), the approximate magnitude near the start of the eruption, the spectroscopic class (where known), notes, and references. Note that the JD and magnitude do not necessarily correspond to maximum light, although in most cases they are close. Filter codes are pg (photographic), Ha (Hα), w (unfiltered), C (clear), CV (clear, V-calibrated), L (luminance), o (ATLAS orange), c (ATLAS cyan), G (Gaia G), Rc (Cousins R), g' (Sloan g'), r' (Sloan r'), i' (Sloan i'), y (Pan-STARRS y), UV (Swift UVOT ultraviolet), and standard band names; ? means no filter information is available. The Type column gives the spectroscopic class, based on the Fe II and He/N classes of Williams (1992), where one has been published, as given in the original references: Fe II; He/N; Fe IIb (broad-lined Fe II); He/Nn (He/N with narrow lines); Hybrid (Fe IIb systems displaying broad He and N lines); and Nova (spectroscopically confirmed as a nova, class not given). A question mark indicates an uncertain class, "X or Y" an ambiguous one, and a blank entry means that no class is available. Classes for novae discovered before May 2022 are from the MPE catalog; those for later novae are from published spectroscopic reports, which are given in the References column. A machine-readable version of the table, with units and column descriptions, is available in astropy ECSV format as m31_nova_table.ecsv, and as a plain CSV file for spreadsheets, m31_nova_table.csv.

Authors: A. W. Shafter (SDSU), K. Hornoch (Ondřejov), Jingyuan Zhao (Xingming Observatory).

How to cite this catalog: If you use data from this catalog in a publication, please cite it as: Shafter, A. W., Hornoch, K., & Zhao, J., A Living Catalog of Novae in M31, https://ashafter.sdsu.edu/m31_nova_table.html (accessed [date]). Data for novae discovered before May 2022 are from the MPE catalog of W. Pietsch (https://www.mpe.mpg.de/~m31novae/opt/m31/M31_table.html), which should also be acknowledged. Where your work relies on the properties of individual novae, please also cite the original references given in the References column. This catalog is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).